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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 11:14:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Julian Elischer <julian@current1.whistle.com>
To: Philip Milne <philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com>
cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org, armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com,
        charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com
Subject: Re: Nightmare. 
In-Reply-To: <9608131050.AA02567@ln1d273nwk>
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our best be would be to try find someone nearby who can come over and look
at it for you..


there are biund to be some FreeBSD people nearby if you let us know WHERE
you are..

My guess is that you mistyped the command..
it looks like you typed sd or wd instead of fd
it's probably recoverable if we can find the beginning of the 
partitions other than root.

(root may be lost, but that is the easiest to recover.)

julian


On Tue, 13 Aug 1996, Philip Milne wrote:

> Hi, we are a small ISP running FreeBSD to power our WEB server and mail  
> host. While trying to do a simple exhaustive dump of everything as a crude  
> backup we have brought our system down. Our sysadmin is on holiday and  
> recommended that we write to you for some clues as to what we can do to  
> salvage the situation.
> 
> As root we did the following:
> 
> tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a /
> 
> (We know there are better ways to do dumps but we'd done this before and it  
> worked so we thought it would be better than no backup at all - couldn't have  
> been more wrong there).
> 
> As there were some odd messages appearing in the console this was aborted with:
> 
> ^C
> 
> After that, the system crashed and now, when we try to restart the machine,  
> we get the following status report on the console:
> 
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> Boot:
> -
> 
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> Any help would be very much appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 	Philip
>